"For the past quarter-century on his Kentucky farm Wendell Berry has lived out in practice the beliefs that have informed his writing, both as a polemical ecologist and an admired stylist in prose and poetry. His writings (over twenty-five titles currently in print) include powerful and influential essays, poem-meditations, and the sequence of four novels and a collection of short stories set in the fictional Kentucky community of Port William. This volume, the fourth in the Confluence American Authors Series, and the first full-length study of Wendell Berry, addresses both the diversity and unusual coherence of this classic body of work"--Back cover.